Paying the Rent: languaging particularity
and novelty
Pagando o Aluguel: particularidade e
originalidade no uso da linguagem
Charles Bazerman
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
University of California, Santa Barbara
ABSTRACT: Issues of plagiarism and originality have been revivified by the
internet in two distinct ways. First, the internet has provided new resources for
both school learning and school cheating — raising values of individual
responsibility, academic integrity and institutional policing. Second, the internet
has heightened the tension between intellectual property and the cultural
commons — raising values of economic reward and ownership versus those of
cultural heritage, communal creativity, and critical comment. A Bakhtinian way
of sorting through these two important sets of issues, without conflating the
distinct sets of concerns, is to recognize how deeply we are always embedded in
the language of others, using and responding to utterances that proceeded ours,
while also recognizing the supplement of originality, freshness, or situational
specificity expected in particular tasks. When we analyze academic and other
situations from this perspective we find that the expected reliance on the cultural
commons and the expected supplement varies from task to task, and a procedure
which is considered cheating or a failure of originality in one situation is expected
and appropriate in another. In educational settings we would do well to identify
with greater specificity how students should use the cultural commons in each
task and the specific forms of fresh or novel work we also expect them to accomplish.
We should then calibrate our identification of plagiaristic cheating in relation to
the specific expected originality appropriate to the task.
KEYWORDS: Plagiarism; originality; school learning; school cheating.
RESUMO: Problemas de plágio e originalidade têm sido reavivados pela internet
de duas formas distintas. Primeiro, a internet tem proporcionado novos recursos
tanto no âmbito da aprendizagem quanto no âmbito da fraude escolar – trazendo
à tona valores de responsabilidade individual, de integridade acadêmica e de
políticas institucionais. Segundo, a internet tem aumentado a tensão entre a
propriedade intelectual e cultural do que é comum – elevando os valores da
* [email protected]
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recompensa econômica e da propriedade contra os valores que se referem ao
patrimônio cultural, à criatividade coletiva e ao comentário crítico. Uma maneira
bakhtiniana de distinguir esses dois conjuntos importantes de questões, sem
misturar seus interesses particulares, é o de reconhecer o quanto estamos
incorporados na linguagem dos outros, usando e respondendo a ditos que
procederam aos nossos, reconhecendo também que adicionamos a isso algum
detalhe de originalidade, novidade, assim como a especificidade situacional esperada
de tarefas particulares. Quando analisamos situações acadêmicas e outras particulares
a partir dessa perspectiva, nós achamos que a dependência prevista do contexto
cultural comum (de domínio público) e do detalhe de originalidade ou novidade
a ser adicionado varia de tarefa para tarefa, e um procedimento que é considerado
como uma trapaça ou como desprovido de originalidade em uma dada situação é
o que é esperado de outra, ou seja, é considerado adequado a outra situação. Em
contextos educacionais, faríamos bem em identificar com mais especificidade como
os alunos deveriam usar a cultura comum em cada tarefa dada, bem como as
formas específicas de inovação ou originalidade que também esperamos que eles
realizem em suas tarefas. Devemos então ajustar o que identificamos como plágio
ou fraude escolar em relação às nossas expectativas quanto ao que esperamos de
originalidade em uma tarefa.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Plágio; originalidade; aprendizagem escolar; fraude (cola)
na escola.
The ancient topics of plagiarism, imitation, and originality have gained
new prominence in the age of the internet in relation to two issues that evoke
different spectra of values. First, the internet has provided new tools, new fears,
and new urgency to questions of school cheating—raising values of individual
responsibility, academic integrity and institutional policing. Second, the
internet has heightened the tension between intellectual property and the
cultural commons—raising values of economic reward and ownership versus
those of cultural heritage, communal creativity, and critical comment. The
first pits integrity versus individual expediency that is destructive to the
institutions of education. The second weighs the nature of property and how
it might be balanced against other social values, including each generation’s
access to the accomplishments of the previous. Both of these discussions are
important, but it is hard to speak of them in the same space without conflating
distinct sets of concerns. Yet in sorting through these issues we will also gain
clarity on other related concerns that test the boundaries of individual and
communal creativity, such as the role of schools in enculturating students into
received knowledge and practice versus the role of schools in fostering
individual judgment and accomplishment.
The words we speak and write grow out of the words of others. Our
use of each other’s words makes language possible and our response to the
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words of others motivates us to speak. This realization about the intertwining
of our words with the words of others complicates the certainty of moral
judgment many attach to plagiarism. Using each other’s words is no sin, but
it does go back to the origin; it is the seed of human knowledge, and it is the
means of our originality and intellectual differentiation. Schools, in particular,
intentionally surround children with the words and knowledge produced by
their culture so that each new generation can draw on these wells. Yet we also
know there are criminals, people who abuse others’ words for narrow selfinterest, and we also know that some students cheat by relying too directly on
the words of others.
The paradoxes of originality arise because we use the common stock of
words, topoi, figures, organization, phrases, and all the other tricks of language
to fit the moment and situation. As Bakhtin says, we populate the language
of others with our intentions (p. 294). The words may be familiar, but the
intention is ours at that moment in that situation. Children in and out of
school are constantly expected to speak and write to reveal what they have
learned from reading others, what they understand as relevant to the questions
being asked of them in the moment. Further, in some situations our
utterances are expected to have the ring of novelty or special situational
appropriacy. Depending on the question, a student may be expected to draw
fresh implications, applications, or conclusions, but wandering too far into the
student’s own thoughts risks falling into error or off the topic. At the right
moments the appropriate appearance of novelty may grant the benefits of
recognition, privilege, or future authority if the words succeed, but if the words
are found wanting, intentions and acts may be incomplete and subject to
failure, leaving a blemish on future reputation and authority. So, if we rent
words, certain tasks require us to pay the rent by particular work of our own.
But this is not a single kind of work— different genres, activity systems, and
situations call for different kinds of work. So while there may not be an
original sin here, there are many potential local failures.
Before we analyze these moments of failure to do specific forms of
work, let me reframe the problematic of originality. Every child born since
the start of language grows up in a complex built symbolic environment—
built and maintained by predecessors and compeers. Without the constant
animation and reanimation of that symbolic environment and without each
child’s learning to participate in it, it would collapse into a silence that separates
people. Schools serve to familiarize students with these symbolic riches, to
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engage students in the meanings of this heritage, and to enable them to act
wisely using these resources in the fresh circumstances of their lives in an
evolving society. In this symbolic environment, children learn to do the
repetitive, the expected, and the unexpected. Further, each child born today,
5000 years into the literacy experiment, 1000 years into the print experiment,
150 years into the electric communication experiment, and a decade into the
world-wide-web experiment lives in an increasingly dense symbolic world,
resonant with messages from long ago and far away and messages that
encompass the globe in an instant. Yet this inscribed symbolic world must be
constantly animated in use to be more than scratches in clay or electrons
entropically sinking into disorder.
This environment is ever more complex and people find themselves in
increasingly novel positions in a proliferating landscape. But this world is not
inchoate—it is organized through activity systems and genres that mediate
particular interactions and relations, and that form chronotopic expectations
for information, location of knowledge spaces, and unfolding of symbolic
events. In this symbolic environment we learn by imitation and appropriation,
yet we always act from the origin point of ourselves and our intentions to mark
our presence, interests and action —no matter how forthcoming, clever,
strategic, coded, deferential, defensive, reticent, submerged, or hidden we may
inscribe ourselves. Even when we only respond to a request for our names,
we respond from the origin, appropriately. And when we account the events
of our lives or what we have witnessed, we respond from our origins with
particularity and novelty. In each case we create a unique presence in the
symbolic world—time and place stamped with local content. Our comments
are anchored to the unique moment and within a unique co-text and intertext
by the pervasive linguistic features of indexicality.
But we do not attribute originality to each of our acts. In many
situations attribution of “originality” is not desired or prized. I study tai chi
and sing in a chorus. In both activities, individuals work hard—physically,
technically, cognitively and emotionally—to inhabit and reanimate a deeply
familiar practice. We do not want ill-formed notes or movements, but rather
a performance filled with intention and meaning that reinhabits and
reanimates the tradition as we best can understand it—guided by the local
master or conductor whom we trust as having a connection with the originary
conception. In the same vein, some people have a talent for the heart-felt
fulfillment of the phatic rituals of daily life, and some people are inspired
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clerks. In much school learning we are looking for just that meaningful
inhabitation of the formulas—at least until one moves into the upper reaches
of scholarship. It is not only arithmetic, calculus, classical mechanics, or even
economics that calls for inspired performance of the familiar. In literary studies
ability to recount the content and articulate a meaningful appreciation of the
creative work precedes fresh analysis, and in history being able to retell the
received tales with understanding and engagement precedes fresh archival work.
Only some specific situations in school and life seem to call for novel
work, which would earn the attribution of originality and bring to the creator
specific and appropriate recognitions, credit, and rewards. It is failure to meet
the situational expectation for originality that would open up an attribution
of plagiarism, lack of talent, or other failing. We sometimes take the laws
surrounding intellectual property as prototypically defining originality, for the
law of intellectual property hangs on the idea of innovation. And the definition
and application of originality is regularly argued in court. But copyright and
patents also exhibit the odd particularity of what we consider originality. First,
only cases that are in fact economically consequential are litigated or litigatable,
and in a sense worthy of determining originality. If there is no substantial
financial interest, courts will not hear cases and there will be no judgment of
originality. Further, the case will likely be civil, not criminal, and penalties will
likely be financial.
The patent or copyright grants a temporary license to monopoly
economic benefit for a particular kind of novel work, to encourage production
of these novelties, which are considered a benefit to the nation and public. The
nature of novelty has been contested since the beginning of intellectual
property law. In patent law, one general formulation has been that the
innovation would not be obvious to one versed in the practice; this is a
cognitive evaluation of an idealized audience, and not an issue of wording, or
formulation. Originality in copyright law, however, is a matter of copying
wording or formulation. So in copyright one is free to use the ideas of the other
as long as one can reformulate those ideas in ways that are sufficiently distinct.
One can even then copyright the new formulation of the borrowed idea.
If you have ever written textbooks you likely will have confronted
oddities of copyright. Textbooks in a subject often share a high degree of
similarity in structure, topics, content, and analysis, in part because they must
compete head to head to serve similarly structured courses, and in part because
there is the common practice of studying one’s competition. I know of few
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cases of plagiarism being litigated between producers of closely similar
textbooks, even if a leading book is widely copied in form, content, or
approach. On the other hand, legal departments of publishers watch like
hawks any quoted material you use, even though it is clear that the inclusion
of this material will not harm the economic value of the original publication,
but will likely increase its visibility and value. Thus you fear litigation not
from the competitors you copy, but from third parties you are publicizing.
The textbook market reveals also another face of originality that has
little to with intellectual property law. Textbooks may be valued because they
have exactly what is expected in the most accessible way that incorporates all
the innovations of all the other books. Books that are too original may be less
valued. While some books may present a novelty in pedagogy or presentation
that is highly prized and emulated, it may be the books that copy the
innovation putting them in a more conventional form that are best valued in
the market. Nonetheless, all of these books are equally copyrightable.
In books directed toward entertainment, however, there is usually a
more consistent desire for originality, because just the right amount of novelty
of the right kind gets our attention. On the other hand too much novelty of
the wrong kind makes the work unrecognizable, meaningless, unengaging, and
unentertaining. We know this from cognitive experiments with infants where
variation of a rhythm or light pattern can energize attention, and repetition
dull it; other stimuli outside attention or ability to interpret, however, go
unnoticed. But again what kind of work this novelty consists of may vary
from book to book. A detective story may gain from having fresh characters
and fresh locales, but must deliver intriguing but unresolved clues. In pirate
movies of mid-century a major site for innovation and amusement is in the
ingenious daring of swinging from masts.
For literature considered more serious, an attribution of derivativeness,
though not litigatable, indicates a major failing, but in other cases other
influences serve to mark the genre, identify the homage, provide a field against
which new meanings and experiences are created. It takes detailed analysis of
each case to locate the combination of sources and influences that underlay the
text, that reformulate uniquely in combination and local context, and that
provide sites for specific surpluses of creation. Which of these combinations
and excesses in which context, drawing on which resources the writer brings,
provide for a depth of expression, observation, imagination, structure, or
thought to be considered original? Which will be seen as fakery, ineptly
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parading in borrowed costume? It is the work of literary criticism to parse the
virtues, sources, and inventive work of texts valued for their uniqueness. The
tropes and measures of literary originality are quite distinct from those of the
intellectual property courts.
In news, novelty comes not from the freshness of the wording or
structuring which are so routine as to be churned out against deadline, but in
the happenings reported which are to be collected and transcribed through
witnessing in real time and going to the right sources. Failures and fakery here
have to do with not being in the right place, not going to the right source,
making up material (being too original!) not grounded in fact gathering. In
the extreme case, stock reports must be original every day, but the elements
are absolutely repetitive, in form, and in source—which are signs of authority
and accuracy.
In science, plagiary and fakery are rarely of immediate economic value,
but steal fame (which might have secondary rewards for tenure, promotion,
and reputation) or mislead colleagues, wasting their time on unauthenticated
or faked results. There the work of originality depends on both intertextual
savvy and material practice—on both theoretical and empirical work. All these
forms of work rely on learning from the writings of colleagues, which is then
re-represented as part of identifying one’s contribution.
We could continue the examination in every other sphere where visible
word borrowing or allegation of inauthenticity of words is attributed as a
failing, and in each case we will see a somewhat different configuration. Politics
is particularly interesting in that political speeches are highly patterned and
familiar in content and phrasing, and politicians themselves are evaluated not
for originality so much as leadership, trustworthiness, representation of group
values and interests—and other such communal phenomena. But every once
in a while a politician gets in trouble for borrowed words—though not for
purchased ones (from their hired speechwriters).
But to academics and educators the site most important to sort out, and
the one currently most conflated ideologically with other settings, is
schooling. In schooling the kinds of novelty and work added we look for are
quite distinct from what concerns us in other domains, and we make serious
pedagogical mistakes by not recognizing the particularity of our educational
interests in work added by students. No serious money is involved, nor fame
and promotion, nor amusement, nor the production of new documents that
extend the human experience, nor the production of reliable news. We are,
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rather, concerned with student learning and development which we believe
requires students to perform certain kinds of work while producing texts, by
which we then evaluate student learning.
Student learning and growth is not necessarily congruent with
originality. There are many moments from primary through undergraduate
education where it is appropriate for students to repeat words from their
books, lectures, and class discussion, even without attribution. Many
classrooms live under the umbrella of a single authoritative voice embodied
in an alliance of textbook and teacher. Students are expected to repeat mantras
from their mathematics, physics, biology and grammar textbooks at the
appropriate moments, and apply them in problem procedures that are so
familiar and expected that the teachers are given answer keys. There is no need
for citation, because everyone knows the textbook defines the universe of
discourse. Students who remember from the textbook without citation are
praised. Those who use the intermediary of a classmate in the exam room are
punished. However, a study session with the same classmate and the same
textbook the night before would help both do well on the exam.
This does not mean that there is no intellectual work in learning calculus
or sentence subordination or chemical analysis—but only that the work the
students need to accomplish is authoritatively guided and the results known.
Students have to think and work hard to get to the right place, but that place
will have no surprises for the more knowledgeable instructor.
Until students reach more advanced levels of schooling, originality if it
is desired, is a specialized domestic creature. Student products, if surprising,
are likely to be so because of what we know about the student, rather than
because no similar utterance has ever come from the mouth or pen of a
student or scholar. When the task is summary (and consider that some student
summaries can be surprisingly good), the task is of selection, arrangement,
coherence, and transition—not of coming up with fresh wording. It is
expected that students will use some wording from the original—with no need
to scatter quotation marks throughout. Only an overall attribution to the text
summarized is sufficient. Where multiple sources are drawn on, or students
are asked to take on commentary roles with respect to texts, then citations may
need to be more explicit and wording of the sources needs to be marked. Even
then shared resources that pervade the classroom may not need specific citation
in the resulting essays. The need for explicitness of citation increases as students
reach beyond the texts that are common ground in the classroom. In the case
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where outside materials are welcome or even expected, it could be that simply
the hunting out and selection of appropriate resources may be the extent of
the novel intellectual work appropriate to the situation. Or complex tasks of
analysis, evaluation, synthesis, or application may constitute the desired
intellectual work.
Plagiarism, failure, success, or exceptional success, or going off the tracks
is finely calibrated to specific pedagogic goals. Insofar as we can articulate the
particular kind of work students are expected to do in the situation, the better
we can direct them, give support, and evaluate their products. In some cases,
the teacher would prefer that students would remain within the bounded
discursive space of the classroom to encourage students to be responsible for
all the analytic, evaluative or discussion discourse, all the supplement to the
required reading. In such cases students reaching for novel sources (whether
overtly or covertly) in a sense poison the pristine field for student production
of original utterances—even if those “original” utterances might be quite
pedestrian in any larger intellectual world.
In different subject matters and different kinds of inquiry students may
be asked to bring in unique material and think fresh thoughts in relation to
them. To think about literature from even the earliest age, children may be
asked for personal experiences and observations even though fresh statements
about critical theory may be many years away. In social studies, students’
personal experiences and observations about the world around them come in
and out of focus at different levels, although social science inquiry may wait
until the undergraduate or even graduate years.
We want to define activities and exercises that allow students to
develop, practice, and display specific forms of intellectual work. And we also
want to give them the means to draw on the extensive knowledge resources
available in the library and internet. If their work does not create sufficient
distance and novelty from the sources they are working with, however, there
will be failure—which might be interpreted as lack of skill or fraud in any
particular case. If there is substitution of work by other people—knowingly
or unknowingly—for the work we wish students to accomplish, then they
have avoided the work we want them to engage in. The tension between
students’ drawing on more extensive resources at the same time as they face
increasing demands for their own synthesis, analysis, evaluation and argument
creates challenges for student writing. If they cannot resolve this tension at
their level of skill and within the time and energy they feel they can allot to
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the task, they may elect a short cut. Some students may be so alienated, cynical,
or self-indulgent that they set the bar low on the effort they are willing to
devote, but most students I know want to learn and will do the work, if they
can find a way to do it legitimately. Most acts of conscious plagiarism I have
seen are last minute desperation moves. When the instructor sets the right tasks,
identifies difficulties ahead of time, and provides guidance and support,
students can usually learn to be original in the ways expected of them.
Ultimately we hope students develop independent voices in the public
or professional discourses that become important to them. But even this
ultimate goal is no unified one. A public servant, a business executive, or a
lawyer each has a different relation to different received bodies of discourse and
needs to transform them in different ways to complete their tasks and realize
their potentials for action. Among academics, a philosopher stands in a
different relation to the previous utterances of the field and will be rewarded
for producing different kinds of documents than a chemist or an
anthropologist. Just consider the kind of reading each will have to do, the
kinds of inquiry practice and data gathering each will need to perform, and the
pattern of citations each will have to gather in order to create an original
publishable article. Learning how to do these things is learning how to be,
think, and act like a public servant, an executive, a lawyer, a philosopher, a
chemist, or Anthropologist.
So there are many points of origin for our statements, and only some
of them are in any sense personal—many of the originary points are deeply
communal. Locating and acting on the right originary sources for any task is
important so that we know what we are doing and do it well, but only in a
subset of those tasks do we seek the attribution of originality. And in those
cases, originality has to do with specific kinds of work to be performed.
Originality is not a general characteristic of a personality, nor is it a general
faculty to be uncovered within individuals. It is in each case a specific
accomplishment, and its failure has specific local implications.
I end with a paradox: the more one attunes to communal existence and
the resources communally developed, the more focus and resources one can
bring to a task so as not to view the task in a conventional way and not to be
limited to the most conventional tools. Deeply immersed in the situation and
attuned to a wide selection of the potential resources developed over human
history, one can perform work that appears more original across more
circumstances, finding fresh possibilities within the particulars of
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circumstances than the person who prizes difference and stands apart. It is this
paradox that makes plagiarism paranoia so harmful. Plagiarism paranoia puts
barriers between us (teachers, writers, students) and as much of the human
experience and accomplishment as our path through life allows. Only by
drawing deeply from the collective resources can we add most fully to them
and pay our share of the rent.
Reference
BAKHTIN, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1982.
Recebido em janeiro de 2010. Aprovado em fevereiro de 2010.
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